8 - PR AND DEMOCRATIC STATECRAFT (Trường Sơn)

PR AND DEMOCRATIC

STATECRAFT

Quentin L. Quade

Quentin L. Quade (d. 1999) was professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he also served as dean of the graduate school (1968–72) and executive vice-president (1974–90). His writings include more than 60 essays in journals such as the Review of Politics, Freedom at Issue, First Things, Thought, and

Parliamentary Affairs. This essay originally appeared in the Summer 1991 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

In “Constitutional Choices for New Democracies,” Arend Lijphart sets out to describe and evaluate some of the primary institutional alterna-tives available to new democracies. Lijphart knows that the choice of electoral system is especially important, since it will likely determine whether many or few parties will compete, and whether coalition or single-party governments will result. He also knows that once chosen, the electoral system will be hard to change. Lijphart favors proportional representation (PR), welcomes proliferated parties, and esteems coali-tions. I have publicly defended the opposite view. I urge plurality voting in single-member districts, hope and expect that this will encourage a two-party system, and applaud the single-party government that would result.1

How is it that two democrats with similar starting points like Lijphart and myself could come up with such starkly contrasting practical advice for newly emerging democracies? As in real estate, the key is to inspect the premises. Even a brief and selective inspection, as this one must be, will show why our recommendations differ so sharply, and why I think Lijphart’s position rests on questionable, even utopian, foundations.

Advocates of proportional representation typically describe it as more “fair” and more “just.” Lijphart’s article says PR produces “consensus” politics, promotes “conciliation and compromise,” and is more “repre-sentative” than plurality voting. In fact, each of these good words applied to PR begs a question and calls for a rarely given philosophical argu-

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ment to establish a meaning for “fair,” “just,” “representative,” and so on. No such arguments are presented or even summarized by Lijphart. The only thing certain about PR is that it will tend to re-create society’s divisions and locate them in the legislature. That is its purpose, logic, and result.2

Whether a system that encourages party proliferation is any of the good things its proponents call it—fairer, more just, more representa-tive—depends on a theory of statecraft and democratic form. What is the purpose of the state? Does the adoption of democracy eliminate or even lessen the traditional requirements of state action? In particular, does democratic statecraft have a diminished responsibility to synthe-size society’s parts, unify and defend its people, or identify and pursue the common good—meaning those values that no particular part of society will ever seek as its own but on which all particular parts de-pend? Or does democratic politics exist to do all the things states exist for, but to do them in a new way, a responsible and accountable way? If it does, then the first test of fairness, justice, and representation that democratic politics must pass will be the test of excellence in state action. The second and no less important test will be that of account-ability. But for Lijphart and his fellow PR advocates, the first question appears to be: how well are society’s natural divisions re-created and relocated in the legislature? Where he equates the number of women in legislatures with representation of women’s interests, for example, Lijphart uses the term “representation” as identical to re-creation. In his uncritical implicit reliance on the “picture theory” of legislative repre-sentation, Lijphart writes as if Edmund Burke had never lived.

To prove that PR’s tendency to re-create divisions and proliferate parties is indeed a good thing, an extended argument is required. It must explain how a political system will be “fair” if it succumbs to the cen-trifugal pull of interests, how it can advance the general welfare if it “represents” only minute and particular aspects of society, and how a government cobbled together out of postelection splinters by a secre-tive process of interparty bartering can be considered responsible and accountable. Only by doing this can PR advocates escape the charge of question-begging.

Easy Cases and Unfounded Speculations

I have suggested that PR advocates generally, and Lijphart in par-ticular, tend to make their work easy by eliding from PR’s tendency to re-create societal divisions to an unexamined designation of such re-creation as good. Another labor-saving approach, greatly evident in Lijphart’s article, is to build the argument for PR on easy cases devel-oped in unusually auspicious circumstances.

It is axiomatic that the difficulty of the tests a political system faces

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will be commensurate with the severity of the prepolitical conditions it must confront. I refer to such obvious variables as economic health or sickness, ethnic tension or harmony, religious cleavages or unity, geo-political peril or security. It is also obvious that a relatively weak political structure may work under “fair-weather” prepolitical condi-tions, while a stronger system may founder if it must endure unusually foul prepolitical weather. Thus, if one could know for sure that nation X would never confront any but the most peaceful circumstances, the strength of its political structure would be of little concern. Such an idyllic environment would leave ample room for error; even if the gov-ernment were prone to stumble, the natural buoyancy of society would save the state from falling.

Much of my difference with Lijphart derives from his inclination to test PR in too-easy cases. Most of his “successful” examples of PR are drawn from very small societies. Some, like the Scandinavian countries, are nearly homogeneous, with low levels of racial, ethnic, or religious turbulence. Nor have they experienced any severe economic stress dur-ing the period of Lijphart’s observations. Moreover, all the positive examples from the era he studies have lived under the umbrella of Ameri-can military protection, an artificial and temporary condition that has spared them most of the stresses of balance-of-power machinations. Many also were beneficiaries of the Marshall Plan, which spurred an era of unprecedented economic recovery and growth in Western Europe.

Lijphart’s list of examples contains mostly fair-weather cases; the favorable conditions they enjoyed bear scant resemblance to the ardu-ous circumstances that now confront struggling new democracies. Nor does his list include any of the obvious and dramatic cases in which PR clearly contributed to governmental weakness and systemic collapse. Pre-Mussolini Italy, with its splintered parties and political gridlock, would be a worthy example. France’s Fourth Republic (1945-1958), chronically crippled and finally made suicidal by its inability to deal with colonial and domestic problems, would be another. Finally, the Weimar Republic, where coalition was endemic and weakness perpetual, might be the best of all test cases for PR. F.A. Hermens definitively established PR’s direct contribution to the regime’s inability to de-velop moderate strength and to rid itself of its extremist elements.3 As Herman Finer once observed, PR’s version of “justice”—lodging social splinters in the legislature—kept both Nazism and Communism alive so that together they could murder the Weimar Republic.4 “Concilia-tion and compromise” were conspicuous by their absence.

It seems strange to me that a list of PR examples contains only the beneficiaries of sunny prepolitical conditions. It seems stranger still that it makes no reference to illustrations of PR’s most calamitous effects.

In addition to its unwarranted ascription of “good” words to PR and its reliance on easy cases, Lijphart’s effort suffers from a third difficulty.

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To put the case broadly, Lijphart presumes to know things that the evidence simply does not indicate. He imagines, for instance, that Italy’s relative economic success over the last few decades, Germany’s evident success during the same period, and Britain’s relative weakness can all be appreciably attributed to the shape of the central political institu-tions in each country. If that were true, then one could infer that splintered parties and weak, unstable coalitions (as in Italy) are as good as or better than majority-forming parties that produce strong single-party govern-ments (as in Britain).

Though Lijphart says that the “empirical evidence” suggests all this, it actually suggests nothing of the sort. Instead, the empirical evidence should remind us of the numerous and sometimes mysterious variables that one must take into account when considering such complex social and economic realities. As previously noted, all we know for certain about electoral systems is that PR tends to proliferate parties, while plu-rality voting encourages two-party arrangements. All we know for certain about coalitions is that they are subject to stress and dissolution more than a single-party majority would be (witness Italy in the spring of 1991 as it deposed its forty-ninth postwar government); and that to gov-ern they must form postelection groupings outside of public view (no member of Italy’s electorate voted for its fiftieth government). Abstract logic—plus experience with cases like Weimar Germany and the Fourth French Republic—suggests that coalitions will be a less secure basis for governance than would be a single-party majority. Such majorities are clearly able to act, even while constantly debating and maneuvering against an opposition striving to become the next government.

But what of Italy’s economic good fortune, Germany’s robustness, Britain’s pale comparison? One could attribute these conditions to their respective political institutions only by arguing post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Such an argument simply ignores the array of other variables that any objective analysis should bring to mind. I have mentioned already the artificiality of the foreign-affairs responsibilities that have confronted Italy and Germany in the age of the Marshall Plan and the NATO alli-ance, as well as the jump-start that the former gave to their economies. I would also note that policies which encourage economic growth can be adopted by weak governments, while strong governments are not as-sured of making all the right decisions. It is not unreasonable to suggest, for example, that Germany’s economic strength since the Marshall Plan derives in great part from the horrible economic lessons learned during the PR-induced paralysis of the Weimar period. Certainly the deep-seated German fear of inflation is derived from those experiences. It would be a mistake to attribute Germany’s cautious monetary policy to the country’s contemporary system of modified PR when in fact this penchant for caution is a negative lesson from Germany’s ruinous pre-Hitler PR experience.

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By the same token, attempts to attribute Britain’s relatively pallid economic record to its majority-forming system are entirely unconvinc-ing. Britain has performed poorly by comparison to some other coun-tries—a weak showing that is traceable in part to poor decisions and not just difficult circumstances. But wise decisions are not guaranteed by any political system, and the impact of unpromising circumstances should not be underestimated. Britain, after all, went into World War II in substantial decline, and emerged from it greatly weakened. It did not receive the same massive help from the Marshall Plan that others did. It had to endure the rapid dissolution of a massive overseas empire that was tightly interwoven with the fabric of its economy. Decolonization has required not merely economic adaptation, but a seismic social-psy-chological adjustment as well. On top of all this is the extraordinarily thorny prepolitical problem posed by the Irish question.

The point of this litany is this: While Britain’s economic perfor-mance in the postwar era can hardly be called a triumph of the Westminster model, neither can it be explained simply as one of that model’s failures. The array of influences on those countries that have done better, the degree to which an economy operates independently of day-to-day political influence, and the large number of debilitating conditions Britain has confronted all make it simply unrealistic to cite the British political system as the main debilitator of the British economy. It is wise, as a rule, never to speculate when you can ascertain. Among this rule’s many corollaries is this one: Never fail to speculate when you cannot ascertain, but never imagine you have ascertained when in fact you are only speculating. The causal relationships that Lijphart claims his “empirical evidence” has established turn out, upon closer inspection, to be purely speculative.

The Virtues of Plurality Systems

Lijphart’s dedication to PR rests on his assumption that we can get all of PR’s alleged virtues (re-creationist representation, all voices heard, consensus, compromise, and so on) without any of its alleged vices (invitation to extremism, governmental weakness and instability, po-litical unrealism, unaccountability to the electorate, and so on). But both analysis and history strongly suggest that you cannot buy it that way. Even if fair-weather conditions make PR tolerable over some pe-riod of time, it is unlikely that modern mass nation-states will forever or even for long have such happy circumstances before them. The natural centrifugal stresses and strains in human existence that call the state into being argue for majority-based systems to ensure its capacity for action. And if popular control is to be genuine, the people need to be able to see who is doing what and what each side has to offer, and to make serious judgments between them.

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Plurality voting encourages the competing parties to adopt a major-ity-forming attitude. The parties incline to be moderate, to seek conciliation, to round off their rough edges—in short, to do before the election, in the public view, the very tasks that Lijphart applauds PR systems for doing after the election. Majorities formed in plurality sys-tems are more likely to be strong enough to sustain effective government without becoming unresponsive and rigid, for majorities thus formed are innately fickle, always falling apart, always needing rebuilding.

Moreover, well-chosen policies, including respect for subsidiarity, can foster vibrant local governments and civil societies, thus encourag-ing the very multiplicity for which PR strives without incurring the deleterious effects of governmental weakness and unaccountability. In contrast to Lijphart, I maintain that PR’s true virtues (accommodation of differences, a hundred flowers blooming, and so on) can be had with-out any of its debilitating vices under a majority-forming plurality sys-tem. That being the case, why run the well-known risks of PR? Emerging democracies, facing very difficult prepolitical circumstances, need the best political structures they can get. The best combine great capacity for action with clear accountability and thus provide power-made-re-sponsible. This happy combination is most likely to occur in majority-forming electoral systems operating within parliamentary structures. Of course, even the best arrangements cannot guarantee success in this imperfect world, any more than inferior systems make wise policy im-possible. But the best systems will ensure both that the paralysis of government itself does not become the chief problem before the nation, and that it will be the voters who truly elect and depose governments.

NOTES

1. Compare my essay “Democracies-to-Be: Getting It Right the First Time,” in Freedom at Issue 113 (March–April 1990): 4–8.

2. Since societal divisions are potentially innumerable, one sometimes finds PR advocates like Lijphart introducing distinctions between “extreme” and “moder-ate” forms of PR. In the latter, PR’s natural tendencies are frustrated by devices that give government a better chance to form and function—a repudiation, however unacknowledged, of the logic of PR.

3. F.A. Hermens, Democracy or Anarchy? A Study of Proportional Representa-tion (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1941).

Herman Finer, Governments of Greater European Powers (New York: Henry Holt, 1956), 623.